Cloudscaling’s CloudBlocks architecture provides a simple, manageable approach to building production clouds for today’s emerging applications.

Open clouds are built on CloudBlocks™

CloudBlocks™ provides a comprehensive architecture for designing and building advanced clouds. CloudBlocks specifies an inventory of detailed designs for blocks of resource capacity, each with a particular purpose. There are block designs for compute services, object storage, core networking, and cloud operational services. Block designs include functional requirements and performance profiles so that cloud service levels are defined from the bottom up.

Block designs are translated into live production capacity using components of Open Cloud OS. Cloud operators use Block Manager to apply the software components for a specific block design to a stack of hardware assembled based upon a corresponding hardware blueprint. Once provisioned, the new block instance is managed via a local (in-rack) Block Manager on an ongoing basis.

Operators use Zone Manager to arrange block instances into the topology for the cloud, using the Open Cloud Data Model (OCDM) hierarchy. This hierarchy organizes block instances into geographic regions and availability zones. Zone Manager coordinates the configuration of Block Managers on all block instances in the cloud.

Modularity drives efficiency

This modular approach to infrastructure is the same fundamental methodology used by advanced Internet operators such as Google and Amazon. Both of these providers achieve economies of scale with a ‘pod’ or ‘cluster’ approach to building out service infrastructure. CloudBlocks(TM) makes available a similar modular system, where hardware and software profiles are designed to work together. This holistic design process drives savings through better automation and repeatable patterns. As a result, clouds are more efficient to deploy, grow, and change in response to demand.

Manage service, not servers

By basing cloud architecture on larger-grained blocks of capacity, CloudBlocks enables IT teams to focus on overall system performance, instead of individual servers. Individual server problems can be safely handled at a low priority, since overall service resiliency is provided by layers of redundancy at the availability zone and block instance levels. CloudBlocks presents the ideal framework for IT teams to transition from traditional enterprise datacenter approaches to cloud best practices that support next generation cloud-ready applications.